They are nicely made, and the expensive ones with the gilded edges have butter-soft leather. They’re just the right size for pocket or purse. Unfortunately they are filled to the rafters with information I really don’t want to know about.
Please. I don’t care when Martin Luther King Day is. Or Rosh Hashanah, or the End of Ramadan, or that Parsee festival, Shivermeetimbers or whatever it’s called. And why the hell should I?
I know some people like to keep track of them. The people in the gift and frippery trades. The people who want to give you an excuse every day of the year to buy something from them. I won’t begrudge them their chosen professions, but I know their game, and they’re not getting any pro bono assistance from me.
So I’m not going to buy their stupid overpriced pocket diary that throws these stupid festivals in my face every time I open it. Trust me, I do NOT need to know when Kwanzaa is.
I’ll stick with my tried and true Oxfam diary. It costs half as much, has the London Underground map, which is a much prettier endpaper decoration if unintelligible without a jeweler’s loupe (hey, surely you’ve never actually USED that Manhattan Diary subway map); a few pages up front showing savages eating mush with their fingers; and in between no mention of Martin Luther King Day.
But lots of obscure British and Irish bank holidays and traditional festivals (Grouse Stuffing Porridge Day [Scotland]), along with 0800 MOT numbers and other inoffensive uselessness that nobody nobody NOBODY dares to suggest is somehow essential information that I need to be aware of.
Q. How many blogs and websites do you have?
A. About forty.
Q. That’s a lot.
A. Most are pretty dormant.
Q. Why don’t you get rid of them?
A. They have nice domain names, or I don’t know how to port out the contents that I want to save, or, you know, I’m just busy.
Q. What do you write about on your blogs?
A. That’s the problem. I do not have anything to write about. Some people write about politics, because that’s what other people write about on their blogs, and perhaps when you have a blog you think like a political columnist so you ease into the idiom. I don’t know. Anyway, politics does not work for me. I thought of writing about personal matters. But if they are really good and personal, you don’t want to share them with the world. Except of course in a phony, “look at me” kind of way, like those people who publish their memoirs of being an abused child with Tourette’s. I was, by the way. I’ve thought of writing very serious confessions online, but they would have to be anonymous or they wouldn’t be honest. And if they were anonymous I couldn’t generate interest in them by urging my friends to read them. And anyway there are limits to honesty, even when anonymous. If you’re really trying to hide yourself, you’ve got to conceal your location and friends and workaday details. And if you disguise all that successfully, you’ll remove yourself from any context that is intrinsically interesting. You’ll be writing abstracts of postmodern science fiction.
Q. That’s a good name for a blog. “Abstracts of Postmodern Science Fiction.”
A. Fuck yes. Good name for goddamned Charlie Kaufman movie. Igor, make a note.
Q. Apart from writing, you have talents. If you don’t want to write, you can show illustrations, caricatures, fumetti, webcomics, you know. A lot of people put photographs on their sites. Have you thought about any of that?
A. Oh gawd. Yeah. I do comic strips sometimes, but they’re really time-consuming. People who don’t draw don’t know this. They think a cartoonist drawing is like a typist typing. You sit down and–oh wow, pictures just come outta me! Here’s another one–zot zot zot. Actually it’s more like a typist drawing. I can type 110 words a minute or something. I can set up a spreadsheet, do financial analysis, tweak your webpage, whatever you need. But, draw! Oh it hurts! And it takes so long. To make comic strips in the right way, the proper way for web use, on a computer, using Illustrator or Photoshop and a Wacom, I swear it takes about three times as long as pen-and-ink. You get a much more manipulable result, better for your purposes, but the initial work, all that precision, takes so long. All that David Levine and Robert Crumb crosshatching that was so popular circa 1970: if you do it and then look at it up close in Illustrator you just want to spend all night perfecting Richard Nixon’s jowl-line. In theory there are lots of time savings. You can clone your images countless times instead of redrawing them. You can have a library of backgrounds and miscellaneous props. That leads to problems and makes you lazy. I’ve noticed that most people today who develop their drawing skills primarily on the computer never really master any kind of excellent line. All of this may suggest the low quality of most webcomics. I stumbled across one that is supposed to be long-lived and high-quality, called Questionable Content. It’s got cute faces, heavily influenced by Japanese anime, and very flat-flat uninteresting backgrounds, and boring dialogue. The guy does them all in Photoshop. I admire his effort, but the strip is incredibly lame.
Q. Do you sign them all with your own name? Your blogs?
A. I would say most are identifiable. Either my actual name, or usual alias or nickname. Or there is a picture of me. Anybody who sees a personal website of mine knows it immediately. Except some idiots I’ve known look at any personal website where the writer is a smartalecky female, and figure it’s an alias of me. But these are stupid idiots, with no critical sense, people who don’t read, except for computer magazines and programming blogs and occasionally the back of a DVD case. Hey, this person just used a four-syllable word I had to look up in the dictionary…that’s Margot’s style, I’d recognize it anywhere.
Q. What is your definition of perfect happiness?
A. The Beatific Vision. Get out of here.
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